Rooting: the "how to's" and "why for's". This blog can also be thought of as a tutorial. For now, in the Blog Archive (on the right) you'll find a step by step guide to rooting an HTC Hero for Sprint. More phones to come.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Now that our phones are rooted and we have Nandroid available on our phone, we should probably think about doing a backup of our current system. Making a Nandroid backup is simple but could save you when working with custom ROMs.

First, we'll need to enter the Nandroid interface and there are 2 ways to do this.

Option 1: from the command line.

Step 1: plug your phone into your computer using a USB cable and set the phone to "Charge Only". Also, make sure that you have USB debugging active (Home-> Menu-> Settings-> Applications -> Development-> USB debugging).

Step 5: now we want to boot our phone into the Nandroid interface. From the command line enter the following command: reboot restoreand hit Enter

At this point your phone should begin to reboot and you will land in the Nandroid interface.

Option 2: manual landing.

Step 1: power off your phone.

Step 2: while holding the "volume down" key, press the power button.

Step 3: The phone should boot up to the HTC screen and then jump to a menu. One of the options in this menu is "Restore" and it tells you that you can select this option by pressing the "Home" key. Press your phone's home key and you will boot into the Nandroid system. Restore

To make a back up of your phone's current state (which I highly recommend you do), use your trackball to navigate down 1 position to "Nandroid v2.2 backup" and click it with your trackball.

The phone should prompt you as follows:

Create Nandroid backup?Press HOME to confirm,any other key to abort.

Press your HOME key and your phone will make a backup of its current state and then drop you back at the Nandroid menu. Once you are there, just click Reboot system now to reboot into your phone as phone.

Now you have a back up of your phone's current state (or its state at the time of backup).

If you need to restore your phone to the state in which it existed at the time of backup, just re-enter the Nandroid interface and select -Nandroid v2.2 restore.

You will be prompted to confirm that you wish to restore the phone to the most recent backup. When you confirm this, your phone will revert and you will be back where you were when you made your last backup.

Now we know how to make backups and do system restores using Nandroid.